Creating Content is Hard
Creating content is hard. It’s a visceral strain—a pressure behind the eyeballs that feels physically exhausting. It’s the uncomfortable silence of a blank page, the self-doubt that whispers, "Is this even worth saying?" You aren't just fighting for an idea; you're fighting the fundamental inertia of your own brain, which would rather consume than build. But you have to keep moving. You have to keep writing.
It is a completely different beast than the stress of being a student. As a student, your anxiety, while high, is defined. It is about retention. You have a syllabus, a clear target, and a "right" answer. Your job is to hoard information just to vomit it out during an exam. But in creating, the anxiety is about production. There is no syllabus. There is no right answer. There are infinite wrong answers, and the paralysis of "what if" can be crippling. You are trying to build something valuable and coherent from nothing, using only the skills you have in your hands right now. That is where true productivity is measured.
After finishing medical school, I finally understand this distinction. For years, I lived in a high-stakes, high-structure system. Your thinking, prioritizing, and even your identity are guided by lecturers, timetables, and the institution itself. Now, that scaffolding is gone. You are free. But that freedom is terrifying. You are your own institution. That means you are not just the CEO; you are the intern, the marketer, the janitor, and the brutal critic, all at the same time. What you produce, with no one telling you to, determines the value you bring to the world.
That is a high bar to clear. It’s overwhelming. It’s not just the fear of failure; it’s the sheer, grinding work. It’s easy to look like a creator, to post the "style" and the aesthetic. But the substance, the day-in-day-out execution, is the part that breaks people. It’s why most try, fail, and quit, their blogs and channels turning into digital graveyards. Only those obsessed with the craft, who find a strange satisfaction in the process itself, stay to fight another day.
I had no system, no substance, and failed at every turn. Then medical school started, and that creative drive didn't just stop; it went into a steady decline. It became the ghost in the machine, suffocated by the sheer volume of my studies. That artistic part of me was completely sidelined by the structured, logical student I had to become, and I was too exhausted to fight for it.
But now, emerging from medical school, I have a new kind of armor. Maybe it’s the "badge" on my collar. The validation.
Or maybe, it's simpler. Maybe I have just finally matured. I’m 25, for fuck’s sake. People my age are married. I see friends on social media earning their worth, building homes, finding their life partners. That’s a different kind of pressure. It’s a biological clock, not for children, but for achievement. It’s that familiar feeling of watching from the sidelines, but now it’s fuel. I am at the age where I need to grow up, get out there, and execute. It’s no longer enough to just have potential.
So yes, creating is hard. It might be one of the hardest things there is. But the "student" phase is over. The "limbo" phase is over. It is time to change my perspective, to take the discipline I learned in medicine and apply it to the passion I have for art. It's time to embrace the difficulty, to build my own systems, and to finally become the person who produces rather than just consumes.
